Mounir Fatmi constructs visual spaces and linguistic games. His work deals with the desecration of religious objects, deconstruction and the end of dogmas and ideologies. He questions the world and plays with its codes and precepts under the prism of architecture, language and the machine.He is particularly interested in the idea of the role of the artist in a society in crisis. His videos, installations, drawings, paintings and sculptures bring to light our doubts, fears and desires. They directly address the current events of our world, and speak to those whose lives are affected by specific events and reveals its structure. Mounir Fatmi's work offers a look at the world from a different glance, refusing to be blinded by convention.

A plastic artist exhibited in the world's most prestigious museums, he is a Moroccan who started his career working for an advertising agency. Before he moved on to provocation... and then to glory. Mona Lisa with her head flipped upside down, a white sheep eating her hands. At the Tangiers flea market, in the midst of a bric-à-brac of second hand objects, Mounir Fatmi as a little boy discovered Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece through a reproduction. "That was my first artistic shock. How could I ever have become a classic artist after that ?" he says with a smile.

If you like watercolors, still lives or marble busts, don't bother with him. Mounir Fatmi is a video maker, photographer, painter and sculptor and more than anything an elusive artist. Driven by his insatiable curiosity, he bases his work on archives, photographs and even newspaper articles. Most of his work takes the form of ominous installations made of VHS tapes, cables or horse jumping bars. They are disconcerting metaphors of our times. Violent and possessed, they convey a grave and poetic vision of the world.

Anti-conformist

Mounir Fatmi welcomes us in his studio in a Paris suburb. That's where he works, despite the racket coming from the illegal video game arcade next door. "It's a little unconventional", he admits, though we tend to think it suits him. He might have made 356th in the list of the world's 500 most highly rated artists, with works that sell anywhere between 40.000 and 50.000 euros, he seems to have resisted the siren call of gentrification. Gallery owners call him from New York and Los Angeles, his work has been awarded prestigious prizes, but he continues to work like a humble artisan. "I'm fortunate to have people behind me who reason me and contain my ambitions, otherwise I'd become cynical or depressive."

Mounir Fatmi never did things like everyone else. When he was 4, he already knew we wanted to be a painter. But nothing in his early life as a child destined him to such a vocation. His courier father and his housewife mother were always busy with daily chores. They had to feed and raise five girls and two boys. "There weren't many cultural objects at home. There was a dictionary that was passed around in the neighborhood. The Koran was on a shelf, but we were never pure enough to touch it. And on the wall there was a picture of the king. For a long time, I actually thought he was a member of the family", he says with a hint of impertinence.

For this budding artist, Tangiers in the 1970s is a fascinating world. The last representatives of the beat generation can be found there, among which the famous writer Paul Bowles. But it's his uncle, a construction painter, that Mounir chooses as a role model. "He always had a cigarette in his mouth and paint under his fingernails. He lived alone his whole life. He was a very handsome and above all a very free man", he recounts. Mounir Fatmi undoubtedly inherited that freedom. When he was 17, before he even graduated from high school, he registered at the Casablanca art school.

But, dissatisfied with his training there, he left the school after only three months. So he flew to Rome and attended the Academy of Arts there. But he was disappointed again. "The Academy was too classic. All the students started drawing the same way. After a few months, we were all capable of copying the great masters." So goodbye Rome, and back to Casablanca it was.

"Painted, erased"

As he was good at drawing, he joined an advertising agency as a simple graphic designer. Six years later, he had successfully climbed the ladder and become its artistic director. "I learned a lot about the way images are manipulated. I understood that everything was manufactured and that thoughts were put in people's heads. And that's precisely what I avoid doing in my work." Again, the material comfort of a salaried job wasn't enough to retain him, so he left the world of advertising and resumed his artistic career.

His first paintings, exhibited in Casablanca in 2003, were very successful. He even was awarded the young painters' prize. "When I heard these petits-bourgeois say my work was very interesting, I got scared. So I decided to erase all my paintings." He covered them all with white paint and titled them "Painted, erased". The Moroccan press went wild, covering in insults a man who had so far been seen as "one of the great hopes of Moroccan painting".

Should this be seen as a sign of Mounir Fatmi's excessive pride ? Perhaps he is nothing more than a hopelessly indecisive artist ? No, he's just a veritable sponge. He takes in all that surrounds him. "I live with a sense of emergency. I don't have time for 'should-haves'", he explains. Comfort distresses him, the sensation of having accomplished his duty is a foreign concept to him. He won't let himself get locked inside anything, not even his own identity. "Besides, in the US I'm a French artist because the French touch sells. And in France, I'm an immigrant artist". Not a nationalist nor idiotically patriotic, he is a self-proclaimed nomad who never feels more at ease than in hotels and airports.

Political conscience

Nevertheless, Mounir Fatmi does admit having a political conscience. "When you come from an Arab country, you can't not have one. When you see the catastrophes caused by politics in our countries, you can't just stand by. " Incidentally, he describes himself as "a revolutionary, naïve and pretentious romantic". If he wasn't naïve, how could he have imagined shooting a remake of Andy Warhol's famous film Sleep, with Salman Rushdie as the main actor ? To this day, he hasn't managed to convince the writer, but he's hopeful he can recreate the character in 3D. And if he wasn't pretentious, he probably wouldn't have been able to convince the Black Panthers, whose paranoia is legendary, to sell him certain archives and FBI recordings for his piece Out of History, initiated in 2006.

Today, his dream would be to put together an opera. Five Muslim astronauts of diverse observances would sing in Arabic and split between themselves the lands of an untouched planet. "But that would require at least two years of work and a lot of money. I'm a little tired of looking for funding. Unless I win the lottery, chances are slim the project will ever come to life the way I imagined it".

Even if he's been told many times that it's rude, Mounir Fatmi is an artist who isn't afraid of talking about money. "Some time ago, someone told me: 'It's funny, today one can buy a small apartment, a car or one of your pieces'."

Mounir Fatmi's calendar is fully booked until 2013. He is currently exhibited at Galerie Hussenot in Paris ("Seeing is Believing"). One of his future pieces will feature obstacles held at arm's length by individuals of various heights. Which isn't surprising for this man who seems to be only driven by obstacles.